Interview mit Paul Riedl von Blood Incantation

Deutsche Version lesen 2021 BLOOD INCANTATION managed to truly surprise their fans, by releasing an atmospheric ambient album, instead of their usual atmospheric death metal. Their newest record “Absolute Elsewhere” seems to be a mix of both, but in combination with some classic seventies progressive rock. In this interview, singer Paul Riedl explains how BLOOD INCANTATION came up with the two 20-minute songs on their newest album, and what the meaning of our life has to do with it.

In part 1 of the Interview Paul Riedl talks about the creation process of „Absolute Elsewhere“, the influence, that the ambience album „Timewave Zero“ had and how the maxi single „Luminescent Bridge“ came about.

Let’s get right to it. So all of your work has some extraterrestrial theme. What is it about that topic that fascinates you so much, to the extent that you’ve dedicated all your work to it?
Correction. It is not an extra-terrestrial theme. It is a cosmic, extra dimensional, non-humanoid, psychedelic, otherworldly, et cetera theme, which does not simply permeate all of my work for BLOOD INCANTATION as our overarching concept, but runs through every single band I’ve ever been in for 22 years. Literally every single band.

Why would I dedicate my life to the great mystery, which has compelled human civilisations across this planet for ten thousand years to the thing that all of us are trying to figure out? I would rather ask you or your fans or readers, why are they not interested in the great big unknowable? Why are they not motivated by the most motivating factor, which literally drives the development of civilisation through millennia across the planet? How could you go about your day without considering your place in the universe as to be something important or meaningful, in the same sense as a leaf on the tree or a rock at the bottom of a stream? Or you know a panda bear or a pyramid or all of these things. How could you divorce yourself from the multiplicity and the mosaic of human experience amongst the universes? Not just this one but all timelines, all worlds.

So it’s quite obvious why I’ve been motivated to do this, it’s because there’s nothing else to do on planet earth, than to notice these things. Everything else is frivolousness, it’s superficiality, it’s materialism, it’s trivial, it’s inconsequential. Be it scripture, government, civilisation itself. Everything is pointing us towards the great unknown. BLOOD INCANTATION is merely an omen of this.

What was the creative process like for “Absolute Elsewhere”? Where did you start, who did what? And how did it all happen?
It’s many years in the making. Some of the riffs on this record actually predate “Starspawn”. The final riff on “The Message” I wrote in 2014 because this riff could only be the final riff on an album but “Starspawn” resolves quite naturally. You couldn’t add another song, just to put this riff on the end of it. It would be bloated.

We tried again on “Hidden History Of The Human Race“ but the outro for “Awakening From The Dream Of Existence” resolves quite naturally with the acoustic outro and it would be stupid to put it at the end of “Awakening” after it’s gone through this twisting, cool down to get slower and slower to the funeral doom part. The beginning Riff to “The Message” was actually rehearsed as a song that was going to be on “Hidden History” as well. The first two or three minutes, all the way with the choppy vocals and the clean guitars. That’s another really old one and we more or less said “This is where we are trying to go but we are not ready. So we will put this here and we will come back to it when the time is right.”

“The Stargate” Isaac started writing in 2020-2021 and he actually started writing part three first. That was the first riff and then he started working backwards and then wrote part one, which we knew was going to have the interlude of the ambience section. But we went through a couple of iterations of what that was going to be and at the same time he was working on it at home, we were working on “Timewave Zero” in 2021.

So technically, you were working on both albums at the same time? How did “Timewave Zero” affect “Absolute Elsewhere”?
“Timewave” was actually critical to the development of “Absolute Elsewhere”, specifically because during 2020, when we could not tour, we improvised together for over a year. We didn’t play any Metal at all. We took down the drums, we took down the guitar amps. Originally we were playing our synths through our guitar amps, which is quite a strange sound. Very shrill and feedbacky and no low end to speak of. And we would record all of those rehearsals with just an iPhone voice memo in the middle of the room. Maybe with a t-shirt over it, or a leather jacket.

Sometime during covid we bought individual mixers for our synth stations, we bought a computer, we bought a recording interface, we got logic, we got all these mics and all this stuff to make a genuine rehearsal studio so we could actually record our stuff and make preproduction.

And during all of this, we’re keeping to our traditional rehearsal schedule of four to six days per week, 48 hours per day. We’re only improvising. We’re not playing any old songs, we’re not playing any metal whatsoever. We’re just playing free, jamming and we recorded at least 50 hours, maybe 100 hours of stuff. A lot of it is totally unusable but it was beneficial nonetheless and some of it is actually coming out right now on the “All Gates Open: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack” which is the soundtrack background music to the documentary of our time at Hansa.

It was quiet. We learned a lot about each other as friends, as musicians and as a band. We had to relearn how to communicate in a new context where there is no furious drumming or aggressive vocals and loud distortion to hide behind. It’s extremely vulnerable. And we had to listen acutely to each person and each person- some people became less boisterous some people became more confident in their space. So everybody met at a 25-25-25-25% collaborative meeting point. And during that time, over a year, no writing, just playing for fun, just exploring.

After about a year we started actively composing “Io” and “Ea” from “Timewave Zero”, which are not improvised, there’s no freeform on those. These are completely written and arranged on the whiteboards as meticulously as we do to our metal. And while we were doing all of that, our mental headspace was changing. It’s growing and evolving to incorporate this more collaborative energy.

Because in the past, the first two records, it’s mostly Isaac and myself who write everything and maybe we’ll arrange something as a group. But in general, we’ll bring an entire song to practice and say “Okay, Morris, here is how you play this part, let’s keep moving” and Isaac will say “Okay, Paul, here’s how you play this part, let’s keep moving” and we just do that.

We’ve had this method for almost ten years, but “Timewave” almost dissolved that and made it so for the first time on a BLOOD INCANTATION record every sound you hear on “Timewave Zero” is performed by the person who wrote it. Whereas on all of our other records either I would write it and say how it’s played or Isaac would write it and say how it’s played. Sometimes even the drum parts.

For “Timewave” every person contributed completely equally. There was no pre-existing sounds, there was nothing that a person had had an idea at home and brought it to practice. Everything was developed collectively in the space. Which is a very interesting and almost reinvigorating way to make music with our guys.

With that in mind, the music we were writing in the background, which was becoming “The Message” and “The Stargate” was changing. And it’s becoming more adaptive and flexible and being stretched out. So even though Isaac wrote “The Stargate” mostly at home, as soon as he brought it to the space, it got stretched out quite a bit.

So you’ve mentioned “The Message” and “The Stargate”, but how does “Luminescent Bridge” come in here? How did that happen?
It’s a maxi-single, so the a-side, Isaac actually wrote after “The Stargate” and it was maybe going to be track two on the album but they’re really quite different feels in the songs. So it was almost immediately apparent that this didn’t suit the new album material, necessarily. Not that it’s a bad song or a throwaway track, just that “The Message” and “The Stargate” are pretty crazy. They needed to be this way. The only reason it was maybe going to be on there was as a backup plan, if we couldn’t fill out “The Message” on the b-side. Because once “The Stargate” became 20 Minutes, we knew they both had to be 20 minutes. Worst case we could have a three song album where “Obliquity of the Ecliptic” is track two and the b-side is the rest.

“Obliquity” was actually only five minutes long, when Isaac originally wrote it. It was going to be a Sub Pop single series, 7-inch. Which we thought would have been really cool, would’ve ruffled a lot of feathers and would have put a lot of new eyes on us. We were in eight months of back and forth with their lawyers and our lawyer and it was ultimately too restrictive. They own every single thing they ever pressed, which is not how BLOOD INCANTATION operates, even remotely. We have 100% of the masters, rights and likeness ownership pertained completely by us. Century Media and Dark Descent both license the right to manufacture and distribute our music in their respective territories under what’s called the term to base regional contract, so nobody owns BLOOD INCANTATION’s music, except for the four of us.

That was not going to pass and so, once we came to that realisation, we were like “Hey, we’re gonna have to record this soon, what are we recording this for, what’s going on?” And then, in March 2023 it came to pass “okay, we won’t do that, let’s do this with Century and maybe we can have a 2- or 7- inch or something like that. Because we had two tours booked, we were up against a wall. And basically, at a major label like Century Media, there’s enough people on the payroll and the graphics department, that by the time you press up a 7-inch, it ends up costing about the same material price as the 12-inch but you can’t charge a 12-inch price for it so you’re gonna lose money. That’s why most of these labels don’t do 7-inches. So they were like “What about a 45RPM 12-inch” and we were like “yeah, okay, so like a maxi-single from the 80s, that’s classic, we would love to do that, as long as it has the maxi-single 45RPM sticker like Iron Maiden or Eloy”. They thought it was a little antiquated but whatever.

But they told us: “You can’t have a five minute song on a maxi single. The whole point of a maxi single is to incorporate more songs per side.” So we had to stretch out this five minute “Obliquity” song and the title track was actually an acoustic interlude, similar to what we did on “Starspawn” with “Meticulous Soul Devourment” or on “Hidden History” with “Mirror Of The Soul”. It was going to be two or three minutes, just acoustic instruments, maybe synth. How do we flesh out a five minute song and a two minute interlude into two 10 minute tracks? We did that on about a week’s notice, and we went back to the songs, which we had been practicing. So at this time, early 2023 we are writing “The Stargate” and “The Message”, we are writing “Obliquity”, and we are rehearsing a completely different set for the tour, which starts in three weeks. So there’s a lot happening, but we reevaluated “Obliquity” with this post “Timewave”, collaborative stretching, and we fleshed it out.

Originally, when Isaac wrote it, it was supposed to be just a 7-inch single, short, to the point. We have so many long songs. We’re not against short songs. He just wanted to make one that was a little more compact and a little more concise. And so we had to reconfigure “Obliquity” into this long, epic type of track. And then this guitar solo went from a 30 second fade out into this, two or three minute thing. Morris was like, “Well, what the fuck am I supposed to do? I don’t want to just dive bomb and whammy bar for two minutes!” One of the things Isaac was experimenting with “Obliquity” was this kind of streamlined songwriting of a single or a more compact track, and to make it a little less obtuse, slightly more memorable, simple riffing, a simple type of thing – more accessible, but still brutal and weird. And so Morris took that mentality to his solo.

Iron Maiden, Carcass, “Heartwork”, At The Gates, “Slaughter Of The Soul” use an ultimately simple melody for a more impactful result. It doesn’t have to be this convoluted, technical display of something. It can be more memorable and impactful if it’s simple. So he made almost like an Iron Maiden “Powerslave” type solo, or like a Pink Floyd “Time” solo, where it just keeps going and it never becomes too flashy until the very end, when it’s ready for everybody to kind of freak out and to dissolve into the ambient. He had to write an entirely new type of solo. And like I said at the in the background of this, we’re working on these other songs.

So we go into the studio. We do “Obliquity”, stretch it out. It’s as it now is. And then we are starting the process of recording the title track, “Luminescent Bridge”. And we bring all of our acoustic guitars. Jeff has an acoustic, fretless bass as well. We bring all this stuff. And while we’re line checking “Obliquity” with regular instruments, they’re playing the same riff on their electric guitar, electric bass, and Isaac’s messing around on the piano or something. And we’re like, “you know what? Maybe, we should do this, let’s record this.”

So we forego the acoustic instrumentation completely. There’s no acoustics on this song. And so we record this song with Isaac playing the piano, Jeff playing electric bass, Morris playing electric guitar. I actually only play synthesizers on the track, and as we’re doing that and we’re adding these things, this is the first time we ever recorded to a click track. It’s the first time we ever recorded everything separately, because “Timewave”, “Hidden History” and “Starspawn” are all recorded live as a group onto analog tape in complete takes.

And then while we’re in there being kind of free, we’re like “what if we add drums, since this to a click track, you know, what if we add some, like, funeral doom drums to this ambient song that’s kind of cool”, and then we hear this big space atmosphere, and we’re like, “holy shit”. Our buddy Alex Pace, who ended up filming and directing the “Luminescent Bridge” music video, he’s an audio visual guy here in Denver, who we’re friends with, and he plays trombone. And he was sitting there listening, and he was like, “Should I go get my trombone?” And we’re like, “yes, go get your fucking trombone.” And so now we have drums on this acoustic thing. We have electric on this acoustic thing. We have piano now we have trombone. And we were like, “this is getting really interesting.” We were bringing in this new creative energy from these other people, and that was really invigorating.

So even though “Luminescent Bridge” and “Absolute Elsewhere” have quite different vibes, the creation process for each kind of went had in hand?
Yeah, for example, back to Morris‘ guitar solo. He took what he did on “Obliquity” into the pre existing “Message” and “Stargate” solos, and then redid them in this kind of more melodic, more easily memorable type of guitar style, which then elevated our attitude about it. We were like, “okay, let’s really make this like ear candy, but also still very brutal.” We don’t need to befuddle it with all this technicality, because a record, like “Hidden History”, some of those riffs, are the most intricate and dense we could do. We don’t really like to repeat ourselves, so we don’t necessarily have the motivation to make another ornate, technical showmanship record.

We didn’t do this at the time, but, and since it’s come out, and seeing people’s reactions to it, we’ve been reflecting about the similarity to “Slaughter Of The Soul” or “Heartwork” or even Judas Priest, “Painkiller”. These records, which are more accessible, more streamlined, but still resolutely, quite brutal, certainly not mainstream records. I know people at the time were not ready for them, both Carcass and At The Gates did break up after this, but now they’ve come back, and everyone’s like, “Please play ‘Slaughter Of The Soul’. Please play ‘Heartwork’.” But it wasn’t like that then. And today, the fact that people are resonating with it kind of right off the bat is illustrative of the kind of expansiveness of the metal community 20-30 years later. So we’re in a good time now for it, but we were not doing it under that approach consciously. But now we realize that that’s probably similar to what those guys were going through. We took this kind of more melodic guitar approach into Hansa.